21 Comments

A counter-example: more intelligent people are more likely to approve of pre-marital sex, but less likely to have it. I'm a counter-example to that, perhaps related to a highly religious formative period (Robin himself once belonged to a "cult", and might generalize from that experience or milieu) whereas intelligent people tend to be irreligious and may have been so from an earlier age.

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Consider people in sexless marriages. Wouldn’t sex be far for them? Do you think they’d be particularly idealistic about it?

No, sex is a "near" issue in this case. No sex is the couples near mode way of dealing with sex.

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I suppose this belongs in open-thread, but I didn't see it in the recent posts bar and this one at least mentions age. The more we age (study is from 70 to 90), the more different from our cohorts we become. Hat tip to Razib.

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natha, abstinence pledgers are in fact more likely to be abstinent. There was a study that was reported as saying otherwise, but that was a misreading.

Robin, your response was very weak. People were not claiming to refute your theory with anecdotal examples, they were disputing whether such tendencies actually exist (particularly for post-menopausal women) and what is the best explanation.

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It seems more intuitive to me that post-menopausal women would be telling their teenage granddaughters 'boys are only after one thing' and 'marry one with better financial prospects' rather than 'one day your prince will come, and after a whirlwind romance where you bond over danger and overcome (possibly magical) enemies, you'll ride off into the sunset together on the back of a unicorn'.

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Sorry for compressing a word & possibly my intent above.:) By " tendencies" do you mean studies you could direct us to done how long ago with what range of nationalities/cultures?

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"Tendencies" = anecdotal evidence in your personal experence, or peer group? "Tendencies" = speculation based on ______? Tendencies = 1 or 2 small studies done how long ago with what range of nationalties/cultures?

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The New York Times often has 6 paragraph stories about some pattern, and uses 1 to explain that the generalization does not hold for every case, and some cases are even contrary to the pattern. If I were an editor there I would find such repetition grating, but they obviously feel it's necessary.

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Folks I'm talking tendencies; must I always explicitly disclaim that?

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How about artists? It seems to me that verbal/musical artists tend to have idealistic theoretical attitudes towards sex but have lots of sex regardless while visuali artists don't have such idealistic attitudes. Obviously, this is just an "it seems to me" but those seem like fair game here.

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Men enjoying delayed adolescence /male menopause whose knowledge of/time with actual women is filtered thru sexual desperation/nostalgia may not stop to ask the empirical basis for your generalization about "postmenopausal women." Having known many raunchy, cynical, bitter, sex-obsessed 30-95 year old women(as you may know, hysterectomy at any age causes immediate menopause) professionally & personally, I would appreciate links to reproduced non-preliminary research on this topic. Since so much psychology research seems to be done on college undergraduates & then extrapolated to apply to all humans, I am thrilled to hear that attitudes toward romance in postmenioausal women have been studied.! Thanks for the info!

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Why post-menopausal women?

What is fertile sex? Does contraception count, hysterectomy, or gay sex?

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“These folks talk as if they hold themselves and others to the highest standards of ideal love, while happening to speak when they have an especially low chance of fertile sex”

What’s fertile sex? Impregnating someone? Then surely unfertile sex must be jacking off or using contraception?

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Maybe some of what people above have argued is true, but abstinence pledges are having plenty of sex, they just say that they aren't going to.

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Robin: ever notice that all your new, true, and important insights are depressing? Perhaps you should bias your observations to be happier, or do you prefer being right rather than happy?

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